How Nyalai works
Submit a strategy.
Or commission a verdict.
Two paths. Same discipline. Whether you build models or you allocate against them, the process below is how a Nyalai verdict is produced.
Path A
You built the model.
For quantitative researchers, systematic managers, and model authors seeking an independent adversarial verdict on their own work.
- Submit the one-page thesis.Prose only. The economic claim, the class of edge (speed, behavioral, structural), the instrument universe, the intended regime, the sizing envelope, the expected failure modes. Public and non-editable after submission.
- Provide the resolved-prediction ledger.A documented history of predictions the model has made, with realized outcomes. Timestamped, reproducible, in a format we can audit end to end.
- Receive the Verdict-form.Binary output: CALIBRATED or NOT-CALIBRATED. Full audit trail, per-gate diagnostic, verdict scope statement. Published under CC0.
Path B
You're about to allocate.
For institutional allocators, family offices, endowments, and OCIOs commissioning an independent second opinion on a manager or a model before deployment.
- Describe the target and the scope.Who or what is being validated. Which strategy or model. What regime and instrument universe. Whether the target has consented to submit their thesis and ledger (Nyalai does not validate on stolen data).
- Nyalai coordinates the submission.We contact the manager or model author to collect the one-page thesis and the ledger. The commissioning allocator is named on the resulting Verdict-form unless a confidentiality arrangement applies.
- Receive the Verdict-form and the diagnostic.Binary verdict, full audit trail, and a plain-language executive summary suitable for an investment committee, a board, or a governance memo.
Requirements
What Nyalai needs to render a verdict.
A one-page thesis
Prose. What the strategy exploits, the claimed edge class, the target regime. This is a hard admission requirement per Doctrine Section 9.0. No thesis, no verdict.
A resolved-prediction ledger
Documented history of predictions with realized outcomes. Minimum size typically N greater than or equal to 200 for MTL-2 consideration. More for higher tiers. Reproducible from source.
Instrument scope in scope
Public equities, listed derivatives, liquid credit, spot and forward FX, listed commodities. Private markets are currently out of scope (see Doctrine Section 1.4).
Disclosed exploration history
The number of hyperparameter configurations, feature sets, and training-window variants tested during development. Undisclosed exploration is a Gate 3 failure by default.
Sovereignty separation
At MTL-3 and above, the submitting party and the validator are structurally distinct entities. Nyalai does not co-develop the strategies it validates.
No time pressure
Verdicts take as long as they take. Deadline-driven submissions violate a hard constraint (Doctrine Section 8, item 5) and will be declined.
What you receive
The Verdict-form.
A signed, timestamped document. One page for a board member, twenty for a quant. Binary verdict on the front matter: CALIBRATED or NOT-CALIBRATED. A verdict scope statement naming the regime, sizing envelope, and declared edge class. A per-gate diagnostic. A cryptographic hash and an OpenTimestamps proof anchoring the verdict to a specific moment in time.
Every Verdict-form is published under Creative Commons Zero. Anyone can inspect, reproduce, or contest the reasoning from the same ledger. See two live examples: the first Nyalai refusal Synapse v0.3 (NOT-CALIBRATED) and the illustrative reference case Reference Predictor R-01 (CALIBRATED).
The full methodology, gate specifications, and thresholds are documented in the Refusal Doctrine v0.3.1.
Timeline and cadence
How long a verdict takes.
Clean ledger
Two weeks
A one-year, reproducible ledger on a defined universe. Standard case.
Ledger reconstruction
Four to eight weeks
When the submission requires cleaning, completion, or re-derivation of the prediction history.
Revalidation cadence
Per MTL tier
MTL-3 quarterly, MTL-4 biannual, MTL-5 continuous. Every verdict is time-bounded.
Trust is not a result of validation.
It is the product of the rigor with which we accept to contradict ourselves.
Sebastien Assohou · Nyalai · Founder